Newbie Affiliate Should Do To Get High Quality Links And Traffic

Affiliate marketing is nothing but promoting products and services offered by other people (known as merchants or product creators). So to make enough money in affiliate marketing business, you’re going to have to increase your affiliate sales (duh).

The first step in increasing your affiliate sales is to grow your affiliate website’s traffic – whether it’s organic, direct or referral. It’s quite straightforward if you think about it – if more people know about what you’re offering, you’ll obviously make more money.

You’re probably wondering, but we are all aware it’s not that easy, now don’t we?

So, here are excellent tips that you can implement right now to start seeing a gradual increase in your website traffic.

1. Directories

Okay, okay. Before you start lecturing me about Penguin update and how it has affected most of the online directories, hear me out.

The fact is, there are still many high-quality directories out there that you can submit your website to.

Thanks to Penguin, many (not all) people are now focusing on quality directory submissions rather than the old “Submit your site to 10000 directories in $50” or some crap like that! Check out this list at SEJ or this one at DMOZ for some good directories.

Just remember not to over-do it. Also, you can use Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) to separate good directories from bad ones.

2. SEO

SEO was, is, and always will be one of the best ways to get traffic to your website without much investment (in many cases). Now I’m not going to go into details of how to optimize your site for Google search engine because that will take an entire eBook. What I will tell you is this – keep content at the center of your SEO strategy, if you want to get maximum results.

While doing SEO for your affiliate website, make sure that you create informative content along with your reviews and other promotional content. In a study conducted by guys at QuickSprout, they concluded that posts with 1000+ (and in many cases, 1500+) words get the best Google rankings.

You can apply this to your informative posts as well as review posts. More on this below.

3. Content Marketing

As I said, your SEO strategy should focus on content because nowadays, SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand.

One of the best ways to provide value to your audience is to create good quality content on a regular basis. Many affiliate marketers publish weekly blog posts about a variety of topics related to their niche. Affiliate marketers who have more budget and time focus on posting a couple of blog posts every week.

An ideal schedule to follow for your affiliate website would be to create three blog posts per week – 2 informative articles/videos and one review post/video. Of course, creating videos is more expensive than writing articles, but it is nowadays getting more and more popular (thanks to YouTube).

4. Communities/ Forums

Building an online community or a forum is an excellent way to create long-lasting relationships with your potential customers.

When your site visitors join your community and see that you are sharing your thoughts and helping other members of your community by answering their queries, they begin trusting you as an authority and as a person who is willing to give something to back to the community instead of constantly trying to promote affiliate offers.

An affiliate marketing business is not that different from the good old brick-and-mortar business. I mean, of course, you won’t need a physical location for your store/business; but other than that, it’s pretty much the same.

If you’re willing to treat your audience as who they are – actual human beings and not just faceless entities or a number in your autoresponder account; if you help your readers solve their problems, they will thank you for your assistance and will be more likely to do business with you in future.

As you know building your affiliate marketing business is not that different from operating a traditional business. The only way you can keep your customers is to treat them right. The Japanese have a saying: The customer is God. As long as you treat your clients with respect and help them solve their problems, they will be more than happy to do business with you.